All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 4

  “Crows, after a year or two, have a one shot attack capable of taking down a Beast Man, dearest one,” Sky said. Right. Sky and Ann were lovers, or had been in the recent past. Pick Sky to be making love with the woman who terrified the other Crows. Palpable tension existed between them now, though. “The trick should work, emphasizing the ‘should’, as I have no idea how a super-skunking will work on a Hunter with years of training under Rogue Crow. It’s only for direst emergencies, because afterwards, we’re essentially depleted.”

  “Neither of you can control Chimeras like Occum can?” Ann said.

  “No,” Sky said. “Critter control requires a different set of skills, starting with domestic animal control, then non-carnivorous wild animals, carnivores, Monsters and then Beast Men. This takes years to master, and involves tricks and techniques I’d need to learn from scratch.”

  “A skill set I’ve found I’m mildly talented with,” Sinclair said. “I can handle animals, but I haven’t had a chance to work on Monsters yet. I’m a long way from being able to control a non-wounded Beast Man.” I had provided him a wounded Beast Man, not too long ago, the aforementioned Sir Dowling, who according to rumor appeared to be as much of an outlier as Haggerty was for us Arms. Sinclair had done fine with a half-dead Beast.

  “If I may interject,” Sky said, turning to me. “Something Arm Hancock mentioned a few minutes ago got me thinking. May I be so bold as to ask, Arm Hancock, when did you witness the vanish-from-sight trick?”

  “You are bold indeed, Crow Sky,” I said. I could speak ‘Crow’ just fine. “A Major Transform, who might have been Rogue Crow or might have been a Focus under his control, used the trick on me when he or she tried to recruit me back when I was in Philadelphia.” I told the story, and the room listened, rapt. The Inferno people knew in theory about my Armness and how I gathered juice, but it was a different thing to hear me tell my graduation exercise story in person, which involved hunting down an unwanted Transform and giving him to Keaton to be juice-sucked.

  “You instinctively backed away from Officer Canon at the end?” Gilgamesh said, after I finished the story. I nodded. He had figured out something new from the way I told the story this time. “You’ve done that before with a Crow, Carol, if you remember. Me.”

  Shit. Gilgamesh was right. I had been about to be skunked and had backed out of Officer Canon’s range without thinking, just as I had when I first met Gilgamesh. “Officer Canon was a Crow, beyond the shadow of a doubt.” All this time, to have, finally, an answer to the Officer Canon mystery, was a huge relief.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to see this animal control in action, Crow Sinclair,” Ann said.

  “Well, there’s a nasty dog next door,” Sky said.

  Sinclair shrugged. “I suppose.” The Crows, with Ann, trooped outside, leaving me alone with my thoughts, Lori, and a sea of normals and Transforms.

  “So, Carol, what’s bothering you?” Lori said, about a half hour later. The room buzzed with the hum of normal chatter, but quieter now. The party had wound down, and Inferno was drifting off to bed.

  Many things were bothering me, most none of Lori’s business. One was, though. “This Commander bullshit,” I said. “I even had Keaton call me the Commander earlier tonight.”

  “And?”

  “The damned thing doesn’t make any sense,” I said. Whenever I thought about ‘the Commander’, I wanted to fight someone. Or torture someone. Not urges I wanted cluttering my mind while in a Focus household. “I mean, when did those Generals you used as examples ever heal.” She had tried to explain it once, but I hadn’t bought it. When I talked to Lori about ‘the Commander’, earlier, she had said it was a shared dream, or perhaps shared Dream, based on the exploits of Generals like Washington, Grant and Patton. When we were mind scraping Focus Biggioni, though, I learned the real parameters of this dreamt-up nonsense: returning from the dead, healing, inspirational military leadership, overthrowing the old order, and refusing the honor of being ‘the Commander’. I understood the last three, but the first two threw me. “The more I think about this, the more the whole thing sounds like bullshit.”

  “You can’t nitpick a Dream, Carol.”

  “Sure I can.”

  Lori chuckled. “Okay, yes, as an Arm you are fully capable of nitpicking anything and everything.” I glowered. “But in this case it’s a lost cause. The healing and coming back from the dead are our additions, as Major Transforms. It’s shorthand for saying ‘the Commander needs to be a Major Transform’. Back when the only known Major Transforms were Crows and Focuses, this was the most confusing part of the Dream. Crows can heal others and Focuses can’t; Focuses can ‘come back from the dead’, as you’ve seen, but Crows can’t.”

  “It’s like everyone but me is giving in to insanity,” I said. “This can’t be real.” Too magical, and I didn’t like magic.

  “Carol, don’t look at it as something that binds you, but instead as a springboard you can jump off of,” Lori said. “What you will do will define what you are. It can’t be otherwise.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t mystical.”

  “I’m not very mystical,” Lori said. She did the cute coy blinking and winsome gaze trick. Her charisma didn’t work this time. “What’s the Inferno house motto?”

  “‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought’,” I quoted. Buddhist nonsense. Crazy Lori subject change.

  Lori waited me out. It took me three whole minutes to come up with: “That can’t possibly be relevant.” I suddenly felt like someone had chained me to a Cadillac and tossed me into the Atlantic.

  “Of course it can,” she said. She took my head in her hands, tenderly. “Human minds are malleable. Transform minds are more malleable, Focus minds even more so, and Arms the most. The higher the juice level, the faster it goes.” I remembered Sky saying something similar on the long Philadelphia to Indianapolis car ride with Focus Caruthers. I hadn’t believed him. “You know this, because you’ve experienced it.” Dammit! She was right. I wasn’t the same person I was before I transformed, or the same Arm I was before my CDC incarceration.

  Lori couldn’t help but use her charisma in a setting like this, but her charisma wasn’t aimed at making me change my mind, but helping me understand her argument.

  “You’re saying I’m being made into the Commander?”

  “Made, by yourself and others.”

  I was appalled, and half-interested in tossing everything I had accomplished in Houston. Vanishing, going underground. Going Crow.

  “I’m my own person,” I said. Defiant.

  “Be your own person,” Lori said, her comment backed up with her charisma. She lowered her voice and became richly intense. “Leap off the diving board and leap high. If you leap high enough, by the time you’re done nobody will remember ‘the Commander’ was once a Dream.”

  “Are you responsible for this?”

  “No way,” Lori said. “I’m not one of the top Focuses in personal or political power. All I’ve got are a few extra brains and some scientific training to help me make sense of things.” She was dissembling, at least the part about ‘personal power’. I had known she was denying her personal power from the time we first met, but this wasn’t the time to get into her issues. “Besides, you know ‘who’. You invited her into your mind, if you remember.”

  My resistance crumbled at her words. I had invited the Madonna of Montreal into my mind, into my Dreams, to chase Focus Shirley Patterson and her nightmares away. I wasn’t surprised that someone with the ability to chase Patterson out of my mind might be the one behind this ‘Commander’ nonsense. The Madonna wanted me to be the boss military Transform? Well, fine. Boss military Arm was a hell of a better gig than ‘number two Arm’, and sounded like a lot of fun, besides.

  Despite Lori’s logic and evidence, being someone’s pawn still bothered the hell out of me.

  “Besides, I’ve learned the hard way what all you old folks already knew
from experience, not to get involved in relationships involving a fixer-upper,” Lori said, changing the subject and pointedly looking at Sky, who had slipped away from the Crow extravaganza to cadge a backrub from two Inferno single Transform women I knew he wasn’t sleeping with yet. I had heard from Gilgamesh that Lori liked him just the way he was.

  Wait just a goddamned second, though…

  I grabbed Lori’s hands away from my head. “I’m a fixer upper? Me? You’re comparing me to Sky?”

  Lori blushed a fake blush. “I didn’t exactly say that, nope, not at all. I love you just the…”

  …way you are. I refused to let her finish, so I embarrassed the hell out of her by kissing her right in front of her household.

  I enjoyed both the kiss and her household’s catcalls. Immensely.

  Chapter 2

  “Do what you have to do

  Resolutely, with all your heart.

  The traveler who hesitates

  Only raises dust on the road.”

  – The Buddha

  Gilgamesh: December 25, 1968

  “At some point Tiamat might lose her patience over the two of us,” Gilgamesh said.

  “You think so? Just because I grabbed you and left Inferno on Christmas night?” Lori said.

  He was so stuffed he suspected he waddled. The Inferno cooks had outdone themselves, serving up a world tour worth of Christmas recipes. Sky had practically melted in pleasure over the Tourtiere meat pies, some sort of French Canadian Christmas food tradition, and Gilgamesh had overindulged on the desserts, especially the marzipan.

  “Actually, I’m more worried about the juxtaposition of your new status as a mother, and the fact you appear to be…” Gilgamesh cleared his throat, and gazed up into a night sky of snowflakes.

  “I appear to be chasing you again,” Lori said, finishing his thought.

  “Are you?”

  Lori laughed, a low evil chuckle. “Yes, I am.”

  Gilgamesh reddened. Lori walked beside him, dressed in a shapeless L. L. Bean parka, with a dowdy red knit scarf draped over her head and around her neck. Their steps made the new fallen dry snow crunch. “Tiamat has little patience with romantic games,” Gilgamesh said. Lori was beautiful, even dressed as she was. Her glow was incomparable, and this close, Gilgamesh had to fight a tendency to lose his metasense in it. Her glow was even more impressive when she was inside Inferno, as all of Lori’s links to her Transforms mesmerized him into awed silence.

  Which was one possible reason Lori had taken him away from Inferno.

  “Carol? She’s no one to complain about my personal life, or yours,” Lori said. A person might almost think Lori was jealous of Tiamat and her Arm freedoms. Gilgamesh decided that couldn’t be so. No one in their right mind would want to be an Arm.

  “You were closer to Sky, once,” Gilgamesh said, not wanting to use the word ‘break up’. His feelings disquieted him. Where was the anxious male competitive jealousy he remembered from similar situations as a normal man? Did he misremember his old feelings? He swore he had been a rather possessive and jealous young man, back in his old courting days. He felt nothing like jealousy now.

  Nor was this normal courting. This wasn’t a date, Lori had little romance in her, and although Gilgamesh did feel romantic about Lori, it wasn’t an overwhelming feeling. Yet this was courting at the juice level. From Sky’s letters, from before Gilgamesh had met Lori, Sky and Lori had been quite romantic during their earlier courtship. Gilgamesh wasn’t Sky, though.

  “He’s impossible,” Lori said. “He’s got his ideas about the way Transforms work, and we can’t live up to his expectations, so he fights with us all the time.”

  Gilgamesh watched distant cars and did a metasense sweep. Lori’s bodyguards were about a quarter mile away, back, front and sides. He reviewed Sky’s interactions with Inferno, the ones he had seen and the ones he overheard or metasensed. A snowflake landed on the tip of his nose. Finally, he understood.

  He had lost many of his old panic reflexes during the time he had been dealing personally with Tiamat. If he hadn’t, he would have run, from the realization he made about Inferno.

  “Why is Ann so annoyed with Sky?”

  Lori smiled. “It’s not just Ann, Gilgamesh. I broke up with Sky long before she did.”

  “Yes, but since Ann is the real boss of Inferno, her dislike is far…”

  His comment earned him a snowball in the shoulder. “I thought you said you didn’t understand Focus and Transform politics, Gilgamesh,” Lori said. “We don’t exactly advertise this little tidbit of information.”

  “I just figured it out.” He didn’t answer, and eventually Lori waited him out. “No, I don’t understand why, but it’s the only data that fits.”

  Lori nodded, and turned to look over toward the Charles River, and an approaching snow squall. When she answered, her voice was Crow quiet. “Sky and Ann had grown close, I think to the point where the two of them gave serious thought to making things official. Marriage official. Then Sky went and told Ann that as a woman, she should be engaged in something more nurturing, and give up on her anthropology and field biologist work.”

  “Let me guess,” Gilgamesh said. “Ann took Sky’s comment as showing his true colors as an old fashioned male supremacist.”

  “You’re laughing,” Lori said. “I’ll tell you, none of us were amused.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “I’m sorry if I made light of the situation. I know the story from the other end: Sky was attempting to help some panicked Crows, in particular, a Crow by the name of Coriolis. Coriolis has been having terrible nightmares about Ann. Quite a few Crows have a problem with the fact they’re being studied by a Transform anthropologist. Sky wanted Ann to back off a bit, and he ended up, um, taking one for the home team. As he termed it.”

  “So Sky isn’t a male chauvinist pig, he’s just more tied to Crow society than to Inferno.”

  “Uh huh.” More than willing to sacrifice a serious relationship to keep other Crows happy. Gilgamesh didn’t think he could ever do such a thing.

  They crossed a bridge over the Charles River, and Gilgamesh pointed, once they had gotten to the other side, to a path leading down to the not-frozen-over river. “Are all Crows this way? I thought we’d become part of his association,” Lori said, using Sinclair’s term for a Crow’s circle of safe friends, associates and acquaintances. Lori’s face puckered up, like she stepped into a deep puddle of cold wet mud, or she bit into what she thought was an orange and got a lemon.

  Gilgamesh brushed some snow off a stone bench and sat. He left room for Lori, who sat down beside him and hooked her left arm through his right arm. “I’ve met several senior Crows in person, and they’re all that way,” Gilgamesh said. “None of the younger Crows are. I’d never thought about this issue much until you asked your question, but you do have a point about them. Something happened to the senior Crows many years ago, something the younger Crows haven’t shared. The older Crows have much tighter associations than the younger Crows have – if you think Sky is bad, you should spend some time talking with Shadow. Both Sky and I had guessed the Crow killer was a Crow and his pet Beast Men, but neither of us could convince Shadow to take our idea seriously until we had overwhelming evidence, simply because it was rude to accuse another Crow. The old Crows won’t talk about whatever happened to them, either. I don’t understand their attitude at all, of course, being a younger Crow. Nor do I feel the same way. In fact, I distrust many Crows.”

  Lori reached out with her free hand and flicked a few flakes of snow off Gilgamesh’s nose.

  “You were right, Gilgamesh. Ann’s opinions are of supreme importance, and Ann does look out for me,” Lori said, going back to an earlier topic. “I’m not sure what I’d do without her. Go mad, most likely.” This from a Focus who said she didn’t love any of her Transforms. Gilgamesh decided not to comment. “She and Connie worked their positions out among themselves. Connie runs the day to day business of Inferno, while An
n gives advice and occasionally puts her foot down – and runs me.”

  “As best she can,” Gilgamesh said. Nobody ‘ran’ Lori unless Lori let them.

  “You’d be surprised. These past several years, Ann’s been in charge of my reading. Teaching me anthropology.”

  “So, is her ‘running you’ business or pleasure, Lori?”

  “Moving juice and protecting my Transforms is my business,” Lori said. Tired. “Everything else, including being a professor and my work on figuring out how we crazy Transforms can survive the Transform demographic bomb, is pleasure.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gilgamesh said, and grinned. He understood Lori’s comment, and it almost made him glow with pleasure. As a young Crow in Philadelphia, he had Crow companions who sparked his interest in the esoteric nature of Transforms and Transform Sickness. Since the Philadelphia massacre, he had few chances to talk about such things with other Transforms, and he missed those discussions so much. “I’m currently trying to wade through the Popul Vuh. It has to tie into Inferno’s myth hypothesis – there were Transforms involved in those legends. I can just feel it. I was wondering…”

  They drew pictures in the snow and lost themselves in esoteric theorizing.

  Gilgamesh hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for over a year.

  “We probably need to get back to Inferno,” Gilgamesh said, three hours later. He could metasense the distress of Lori’s distant bodyguards. They felt the cold.

  “Business can wait.” Lori grabbed him, and began to unbutton his shirt.

  Gilgamesh’s heart skipped a beat. Surely Lori couldn’t be serious. Now? Here? For a second, Gilgamesh fought panic, but it passed. Something seemed right about this. More than the normal male pleasure urges, something of the juice.

  This was Lori. She was a hard case Focus, but rationally he knew she was nowhere near as dangerous as an Arm, and he had managed to survive Carol’s rough affections.

  “Okay,” Gilgamesh said. He looked around, found a secluded copse of pine trees in the Christmas-deserted park, and led Lori over to it, where she sat in his lap. He traced a finger along Lori’s face and took off the silly cheater glasses she wore as part of her ugly disguise. Gilgamesh removed her red knit headscarf as well. He traced his hand along Lori’s jawline, his juice pulling at hers.